Team Friendships

When I was a kid, I lived for gymnastics. While other neighborhood kids were running around swinging bats and throwing balls, I was climbing door jams and forward-rolling my way across the living room until my mom enrolled me in classes. I loved learning how to front- and back-handspring down an expanse of open floormat and to fly around on the equipment, especially the uneven bars.

I joined a team once I was old enough. At our daily practice sessions, my teammates and I became tightly bonded. We inspired in each other the courage to try new gravity-defying feats and the confidence to excel at competitions. All these years later, I can appreciate the love for fitness and form that I acquired from the sport. I also remember and appreciate my former teammates.

Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.

—Jesse Owens

Recently, I had the opportunity to hear Kim Hamilton Anthony speak about her NCAA championship gymnastics career and her childhood. Competing in the late 1980s, Anthony broke barriers and records. She was the first Black woman to earn a full gymnastics scholarship to UCLA and to win an NCAA championship title. She’s an international gold medalist with the US National Team and four-time US National champion, as well as a Sports Hall of Fame inductee in the state of Virginia and at UCLA.

Lesser known facts about Anthony’s life include the poverty and other challenges she faced as a child. She and her mom cleaned the gym at night after practices to offset the cost of her training. Gymnastics has always been an expensive sport, and it also was an almost exclusively white sport at that time. Most of her teammates lived a far different life outside of the gym than she did. But the friendships made inside the gym were sacred and strong, despite the differing life circumstances between Anthony and her teammates. She’s written a book about her experiences, and I recommend learning more about her incredible journey.

In the speech I attended last week, Anthony was introduced by her former UCLA teammate and co-captain Maura Driscoll Farden in a touching tribute. Their friendship has clearly stood the test of time and their differences in background never seemed to factor into their relationship.

Listening to Farden’s introduction and Anthony’s testimony as a trailblazing champion was truly inspiring. Although I never came close to performing at their level of the sport, I was transported back into so many of my own memories of gymnastics and camaraderie. I could relate to their feeling of love and friendship born in the gym, and I was amazed by Anthony’s strength in overcoming adversity. We’ve written before about how working out together can foster connection, but Anthony’s story truly illustrates the deep and transformative effects of those relationships.